


Strange Bedfellows

by typhe



Category: Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Genre: Backstory, Cohabitation, Conversations, Fluff and Angst, Foot Fetish, Impostor Syndrome, LHM, M/M, Pillow Talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-26
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2017-12-21 11:24:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/899726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typhe/pseuds/typhe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On their return from Forst Reach, Vanyel welcomes Stefen home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

I'll admit I never thought this through. I just grabbed everything and staggered back to Van's room before he could change his mind about letting me stay there. I hadn't really dared to think ahead, even while we were still travelling, and he hadn't said anything of it either, so while we were brushing down our mounts I nonchalantly invited myself to his room for dinner - I usually got away with that even while he was pretending we were "just" friends, so it felt like a safe enough play - and he quietly said that he'd already had my packs sent there and if I'd like to stay a while, I should bring over whatever else I might need, well, ever.

I may have started running as soon as I turned the corner. I gathered everything frantically, wondered when and how I was going to explain everything to Breda, picked up as much as I could carry and realised that was almost the entirety of what I owned. Now I'm staring at his door and wondering how in hell I can so much as free up an elbow to rap against it, if he's even in there rather than having run off to solve all the problems of the realm -

The door swings open in front of me. "Please don't," he says, and lifts a mandolin-case from its perch inside my elbow.

"Don't what?" I ask, manoeuvring awkwardly inward.

"Knock," he replies absently, eyes scanning the room, and he stows my mandolin next to a bookcase. _Oh..._ He returns to relieve me of my folk-harp and my kit-fiddle, and looks sceptically at the rest of my burdens. "Just the bare essentials?"

"Yes," I assure him. "Tomorrow I'll go back for my pipe-organ and my troupe of performing elephants." 

I'm getting better at making him smile, or he's getting better at letting me. I drop the two cases of sheet-music on his desk, for lack of anywhere better, and tuck the little satchel underneath it - it's full of strings, tuning forks, rosin and spare underclothes. I hadn't thought about this at all - well, not beyond the hope of sleeping in his bed again, and not alone this time. I didn't dare wonder if he wanted me to _live_ here, let alone ask, let alone worry if there was space for me. I've missed being here in the evenings - it feels welcoming, deeply familiar. He's hovering by the door with the bolt shot home and the look in his eyes makes me feel like I've never stepped foot in here before.

Like most rooms, it's picked up the character of its inhabitant; uncluttered and purposeful, but still, in its way, a sanctuary. Not much decoration - just some Hawkbrother masks and talismans that I used to find so exotic; now they look like old friends. The soft evening light's glowing off panelled walls, making beads and feathers shimmer, and I wonder if Vanyel even notices how lovely this place is. Beats the hell out of my attic in Bardic. I'm thankful there's enough empty space that I can take over a little of it. He does own a few things - books and such, and it's fortunate that I don't have much to add to his wardrobe because there really wouldn't be room.

He notices me fiddling with the strap of my pipes as I stare about. "Try the middle drawer of the nightstand - I don't use it much." I nod gratefully, and open it - close to empty - and pitch the contents of my satchel in after the pipes for good measure. "Do I need to clear out part of the wardrobe? I could put away the things I never wear any more -"

"Doubt it - my clothes nearly all fit in there," I nod at my travel-packs. "And most of them need cleaning." He wrinkles his nose - travelling can make one feel foul. I'm surprised how well his cleanly nature weathers it, and that he hadn't vanished for a bath before I got back here; I suppose he decided something else was more worth his precious time.

Maybe me.

He settles in his usual fireside chair as I pitch filthy travel-clothes into his wicker laundry hamper, which is already overflowing with his own leavings - I push at the lid in a futile attempt to get it to something-like close, rather than stinking up the whole room. I'd strip what I'm wearing too, but I've damn-all left to change into. (I could strip in his plush Palace bedroom in broad daylight and he'd just ask me to close the curtains. The thought is stupefying.) Vanyel seems as spent as I am, but he's going through a pile of drearily important-looking letters - I should've known he'd be catching up on work already - and I collapse into the chair next to his, wearily ponder its placement, get up, snag its feet with my own, and shuffle it a little closer to his so, should we wish it, we can touch.

He takes amusement in my engineering, and he sets his handful of paper on the low table before us. "Havens, I'm set to be terrible company, aren't I?"

I shake my weary head. "You don't have to stand on ceremony, you know? I'm sure not," and I stretch out my legs, creaking from saddle-sores. I already took my boots off without even really noticing that I was doing so - an insolent habit of mine, that. I remember doing it the first time he brought me here, unthinkably many months ago. I untie my garters too, and as I roll my socks off, he laughs softly. "What?" I protest.

"You always do that," he replies, and I defiantly plant my bare feet on the low table in front of us. "Yes, _that_. I thought the saying was to get your feet _under_ the table -"

"Have I ever stopped at euphemisms?" I wriggle my toes at him, to prove the point, and he offers a knowing look that sets me at ease and aflutter. "I always thought you didn't mind it -"

"I don't _mind_ , no." I used to suspect he just didn't know what to _do_ about my breach of good taste, and tolerated it by default, allowing me to get ever more familiar, but now there's a smile playing about his lips and I don't know what it means but I think I like the look of it. He falls silent on the topic, so I poke his knee with an outstretched toe. "Do you ever give up? Fine, then. It always made me want to do this..."

He slips from his chair and reaches for my extended foot and holds it, stroking his fingers firmly down each side, slowly making their way toward the heel. I sigh involuntarily as he rubs inwards and upwards up the soles of my feet, until his thumbs brush lightly over my toes. "Vanyel," I say appreciatively. It's all I can do not to squirm with pleasure. "I never figured you for a foot-fancier."

"Neither did I. But then you came stomping barefoot about my life," he accuses. I start to feel more purpose in his touch, a curve of pressure over the balls of my feet, a gentle squeeze at the red skin where my boots rub atop the knuckles. It's...peculiarly relaxing, and I feel my tired mind drift toward that dreamlike, thoughtless dormancy, just sensing, just following the gravity of our lifebond until my own perceptions are intractably blurred with another's, with his. I look down and meet his eyes through slitted lids; unexpectedly tranquil as he tends me on his knees, and I can _feel_ a breath of uncanny peace from him as he works, this simple duty allowing him to set down his other burdens. A duty to _me_. He's clear water flowing in my heart, his tender touches carrying me out of my weary _mind_. My last clinging wit wonders how long it can last, because Van letting go of his worries is like the tide going out, or the leaves falling from the trees.

He sets me down slowly, as if his fingers must caress each separate muscle goodbye, and he takes my other foot in his hands. "So why do you do it, then?"

I shrug. "I've never liked shoes. Rarely had any til Lynnell brought me here, and, well - I always felt a bit numb and clumsy in them. Barefoot, I could climb anything blindfolded. Maybe still can. Didn't like losing that feeling." 

It's defensive adolescent scorn-laden bragging and I register his failure to take it entirely seriously. But he knows I don't fit so well in the bridle of civilisation, doesn't he? He's still touching me with gentle purpose, but I feel his attention drifting, out of our lull and back into words and objects, and I realise he's staring at the masks on the wall. "It's hard to fit in without losing yourself. Especially without much to ground you to begin with..."

I reach for his busy hands, stilling them. He looks at me and his tired eyes are bared riddles, threads unravelling between my fingers. _Tell me_ , I don't have to ask him.

"I've had the first of those - the white one - since I was sixteen. It was a gift from Starwind and Moondance when I left K'Treva Vale at the end of winter. They'd been very kind to me, Moondance especially. When I was tired of lessons we'd just talk, and he sang their songs and told me all their ways. He's not Tayledras-born, so I think he understood how overwhelmed I was. And he knew what, aside from magic, I needed to learn from them..."

"Which was?" I inquire, as he trails off.

"That I wasn't cursed, or a monster. That there's good that can come from magic - and from being shay'a'chern, for that matter. That there was more than one way to become a man, and to please the gods..." He sighs, and in his words I take a sense of him hovering, uncertain, between worlds. It's strange, but I can imagine him at that age so perfectly; all adolescent litheness and fey symmetry, lying in bed with his unscarred back to me, a throw of black hair over his neck - "Some of that I _could_ have learned otherwise, if I'd had the wits," he admits with a slight smile, and the whimsical intimate portrait fades from my mind. "But at the time, it was like I'd found the key to understanding everything. Then I came back to Haven, and, well."

"Cold hearts and wagging tongues?" One can never be too cynical about Palace society.

"I was _not_ made welcome. The only friends I'd ever had had been Savil's proteges, and they'd both got their Whites and been sent out looking for trouble. A few of the older mages looked out for me, and Tantras took me under his wing, but everyone else - they weren't hostile, but it was obvious I was still more of a scandal than a person. Plenty of them wanted to gawk at my collection of Gifts, which didn't help, especially given how unpractised I was with some of them. And then there were some who tried to act like nothing had happened and I'd just come back from a midwinter party. Like everything would be fine so long as no one talked about what went wrong or where I'd been."

"I'm sorry," I tell him stupidly, and my toes curl petty and small in his hands. Even with everything else he's shared recently, I hadn't expected him to open up about this part of his history. I'm thinking of weeks past, when I was changing the dressings on his wound and seeing puffy-pink vulnerable skin and carefully not touching, I don't know where it's safe to touch. 

He shrugs, and his restless hands slip to my heel - I sense dull, old pain in him, set past any expectation of healing. "It wasn't comfortable, and I missed the simple Vale life a lot. So I took leave the next year and hightalied it back there. I felt desperate to be somewhere I _belonged_. And when I got back..." He pauses, remembered defeat written all over his face. "I'd lost half my grasp of the language, Starwind had a new student, the lover I'd left behind had long moved on to somebody else, and all the things I needed to talk to someone else about - about becoming a Herald - didn't matter a whit to any of them. Everything had just carried on without me."

"No one missed you?" I ask softly.

"Well..." Half-admissions flit over his face. "Some people did. Moondance, for sure. But it wasn't enough to sufficiently cosset my feelings. I had to accept that there wasn't _going_ to be a convenient place I could belong. No one was ever going to stand still for me and simply _be_ there for me to go home to."

I think, confusedly, of his first lover, lying still in his grave.

"I'm sorry," I say again, pointless words, and he shifts where he kneels, digs fingertips back into my roughened skin because work is the only answer he's ever had to that lack of stability. Because he's welcoming me _home_. Oh gods I love him, and it's not what I had sweet and pretty dreams of - it's ugly crowbar love that pries doors open. We've seen skeletons. "Did I ever tell you where I'm from?"

"No." I know I didn't. I don't. He makes me do things I don't. "I wasn't sure you wanted me to ask."

Not at first, no, and later the void between me and my history seemed too vast to expect him to stretch across. "Nowhere exciting," I assure him. "I'm from Cul Aber."

"Up on the north end of the Hardorn border? That's the one part of Valdemar I've never seen." He pauses to consider this. "The war's never reached the northeast -"

"The Karsite Border war created other regional authority vacuums and a lack of oversight regarding comings and goings across other borders," I pronounce sagely, mocking his tone, then add, "'Least, seemed that way from down on the streets. I didn't even know there was a king, you know? Not like we ever saw king or kingsmen, and no one much talked about Valdemar and Hardorn, only about which of the gangs owned which street-corner. The border guards didn't do much except collect bribes - I honestly didn't know they were _meant_ to do anything else, as I swear almost all the trade we saw was illegal -"

"Most of it was back then - protectionism on both sides, and a few other trade restrictions, not least because slavery is legal in Hardorn -"

"I know _that_ ," I reply flatly. Maybe every child in Cul Aber grew up with that threat - _"be good, or you'll be sold, I'll sell you over the river, make me some money or I'll get it by selling you o'er that bridge tonight, sold to whichever will take you, you won't be singing no more when you's sold -"_ and I fight not to shake from the litany in my head. It's long over, fool. "I knew we saw slavers come from east of the river, just not where from or why. I'd only vaguely heard of Valdemar - I honestly thought it was the name of a gang chieftain out west." Vanyel creases his face in discomfort, too pensive to take offence. "And I'd heard some songs about Heralds. I thought they were some kind of magical story thing, like angels." 

That brings an abrupt smile to his face, looking up at mine with wide eyes. _Oh love, I didn't know you were real but I knew songs of you._ He follows the thread of my words up into the reel, further than I'd yet unspooled them. "The pomp and high living in Haven must have been quite a change of scene, then."

"That's why I stopped telling people where I was from." His eyes narrow, because that is an awful non-sequitur that makes no sense at all and I know it. "Well, I made a mistake and swore not to make it again."

"Oh?"

It seems laughable now, but I was the kind of child who took errors hard and hid them obsessively. Missteps _terrified_ me. "Must have been about a year after I came to the Collegium. A boy enrolled who I heard tell was from Cul Aber - he was a tall fellow, couple of years older than me. I got peculiarly excited about him, which seemed foolish enough even then - wasn't like I'd had any reason to miss the place. So I went up to him and lapsed into cant and asked where his pitch had been and if they'd given the old mayor the drop yet. He looked at me as if I'd dropped a cockroach in his lunch, and then punched me."

"The mayor's son?" Van hazards.

"Great-nephew who'd been fostered with him for most of his life - same difference," I sigh. "Should have guessed - the place hasn't that many nice families with openings for music tutors. But I'd gone and thought just because we were from the _same_ place that meant we'd have things in common and would understand each other, and being so wrong about that taught me to scratch Cul Aber right out of my life. I mean, if even people _from_ there were going to hate me if they knew about my past, I _had_ to take that part of me away. Pretend I was no one in particular, from nowhere in particular."

He looks wry, and a little sad. "I can't imagine you passing for no one in particular. You stick out in a crowd like a sore thumb."

"So do _you_ ," I remind him. "You're right, though - I wasn't like everyone else, I always felt under suspicion, like everyone was constantly judging whether I belonged there and I had to somehow put on a perfect performance to keep them from finding out that I really didn't -"

"That."

"Yes," and he's the last person in the world I ought to have anything in common with, but I _knew_ these parts of us could touch. "I was never going to fit in here. I guess I shouldn't complain - I had Medren to be a misfit with, at least. But I hadn't much else except music -"

"There was always music," and our eyes meet, sharing wordless affirmation. "That was mine when nothing else was. I was never lost until I doubted in it."

I shake my head, feeling almost incomprehensibly connected to him. "I should never have been looking for someone _like_ me, that's just vanity," I tell him. "I was looking for you."

Silence reaches out where words couldn't, silence and the warm quicksilver of his eyes, and I can almost feel our souls mingling unseen as we breathe. 

"I'm sorry," he says suddenly, and his hands resume the work I'd barely noticed had ceased. "Here you are indulging me, and I let myself go woolgathering. I spent so much time in here wanting to touch you," breathless hurried words like he's trying to _apologise_ for what he's offering me.

"Hush. I could have stood for you to try this sooner," I tease him. "Do you know how good that feels?"

"I've some idea," he confesses. "Maybe I _should_ have touched you sooner -"

"No." I'm almost as surprised by my sudden conviction as he evidently is. "I'm glad you didn't. Truth, Van, when we first met, I wasn't ready for this. We could have had that night, but then..."

"I would have regretted it," he admits.

"I might never have bothered to become your friend," I wonder. "I've not always treated my lovers well. I used to worry you'd hear of it -"

"Neither have I," he says shortly. "I've only had so much to give. Most men don't take kindly to being second-place to duty," and worry creases his face for an unguarded moment.

"I told you I can deal with that. I'm not promising kindly," I add, "but I'll understand. And we've got the rest of our lives for you to make all that waiting up to me."

He smiles. "I can try. I can at least promise you won't be sleeping alone tonight."

"Want company, do you? I've missed your bed," I tell him none-too-innocently. "And nice as this feels, it's not where I thought I'd have your hands on me -"

"You're impossible," he tells me, without complaint, and bends his head to kiss my toes.


	2. Chapter 2

Pitch dark and trying to remember how I used to breathe, I admit he's finally tired me out. My pride can bear it, after that last day on the road, and it did take two good, satisfying bouts; we disengaged and called for dinner late enough to exasperate and perhaps scandalise the Palace staff, not that we could ever hope to keep our cohabitation from them in any event. For months, they've been the only people who knew for sure we _weren't_ spending the nights together. We were gentler afterward, with night fallen and candles out, the moon passed from our window, and no guide but each other's touch; I'm not sure a man can survive such gentleness, not without being fundamentally made and undone by it.

I'm aching. My _toes_ are aching. 

I thank my fortunes for granting me a second night in Vanyel's soft Palace bed; my own attic room back in Bardic can't compare to his comforts, and besides, I want no more than to lie here at his side. Would that he were as spent - physically, he may be, but I can hear the tiptoe of his ever-restless mind - seeming louder than often, perhaps due to the momentary quietness of my own. "What's wrong?" I murmur. A tiny part of me dreads the answer, even though he told me I could stay tonight and he'd never take back his word. He won't take back tonight. But other nights, when other things matter more than me...

His low voice seems wry. "Coming home can be a bit strange. Nothing quite looks as one remembers it. And it's some time since - well, no."

"No what? If - if you don't want me sharing your bed -" and there have been enough well-bred boys who were happy for me to take them to bed and debauch them just so long as I was gone by first light -

"I do," and his voice is so small and sincere and confused that I wish I hadn't reacted by slipping into gutters of memory, I wish I was innocent of all the obscurity men put around love and pleasure. "But Stef, it's been more than _some time_ since anyone - I only just thought about it -" I rise up on one elbow, and all I see of him is a glint of light in his eyes. He closes them. "I've lived here five years - ever since they found dryrot in the beams of my last room in the Old Palace - and the only time I shared this bed before was when Liss came to visit me last year. Her idea," he adds absently, as I gape at him in the dark. "She could have slept in Savil's empty apprentice's quarters, but she reminded me about how she had her own room back when there were only four of us - she and I and Meke and Kastor. I don't quite remember it. I was meant to share with my brothers, but she says I went to her whenever I had bad dreams."

"Was that always often?" I ask.

"No..." and again there's more words behind that and I can't pry them out just yet. It's enough to ease his troubled sleep here and now. I can't make him explain a damn thing. "But. That would be why having company here seems strange to me."

"So you mean to say, I was already the first man you let sleep in this bed?" I ask, immediately latching on to the most important facet of his tale of isolation, and I can hear the sound of him smiling and exhaling where a less restrained man might laugh at me. He puts an arm around me, and pulls me tight against his lean body. I'm not going anywhere, wouldn't want to if he'd let me. I've never felt like this, never wanted more of what I have, not merely more than.

"Silver for your thoughts?" He taps a finger against my spine, strokes into hollow ridges.

"I'll push you to a sovereign yet," I grouse. I can't tell him, can't compare this bed with any other, but he can have the gist of what I was thinking of; "Maybe it's not that it looks different from what we remember. Maybe it _is_ different. It means something, what you see in things - like I swear I never really _saw_ your Tayledras masks before, no matter how artful I thought them."

I know he nods from the sway of his hair as his grip on me slackens. "It took me some time to see _home_ here at all - you know, I was quite terrified the first time I came to Haven."

He was? "What would frighten _you_?"

He goes quiet, and I realise what a stupid question it was - how static, as if I thought the he who would answer me were the same as the he whom I asked. I _know_ he wasn't always the exalted hero, and I sensed some time ago that his dauntlessness wasn't _him_ , but a thing cast in fire that he wears as a raiment. He answers his fool lover anyway; "My father, I suppose. And the world. And myself. I was all but exiled and all I could dream of was being able to not care -" and a harpstring shiver goes through his body against mine.

"I was terrified too," and it's an odd point on which to offer my sympathy, but he cups a hand against my head, collects stray wisps of hair in his fingers. "I'd never seen anything like the Palace and had no idea why I was here, so all my assumptions were bad ones. When I finally started to fathom it, it seemed like a dream - I got to sing somewhere warm and safe, and they let me learn to play instruments. But then I tried talking to people."

"Put a few backs up, did you?"

"You _know_ me," I accuse. "I had no idea about politicking and fitting in right back then, either. And some people were pretty hard to reason with. Not that I had reasonable expectations myself - it was hard for me to hear what some of them were saying around the silver spoons stuck in their throats. Sorry," I flap a hand against his shoulder. "But I guess it's funny that I often had an easier time with the Herald trainees. Not so many of them looked down on me for not being highborn, and they weren't jealous of my talents."

"Funny," he repeats without humour. "Well - I told you I didn't settle in well. Even before I had any Gifts for anyone to be jealous of, the Herald trainees all closed me out because Tylendel and I were pretending to loathe each other." My eyes widen - now there's a story. "Afterwards," and he sighs, "I guess it's only as one gets older that you start to understand that Gifts can be more like burdens."

"I might not have believed it six months ago," I admit tiredly. I've missed Randale, and I'm not looking forward to seeing him again in the morning. "Gods know they try to drill it into us, what a responsibility we've been handed, and soforth - but all younglings really hear is how special they are and -" I pause delicately. "Then some of them decide that the last people who deserve such responsibility are the landless, feckless poor."

He strokes my back gently. "I can see how that would be - I always got a lot of 'responsibility' talks from my father, and all that did was put my nose in the air. You should never have had to prove anything," and his hand reaches up to my neck, cards through the hair at the back of my head.

"Well, I thought I did." It's soothing me, though, both his touch and his understanding. "And I envied their easy lives as much as they envied my Gifts. I did get a lot better at dealing with them eventually, but by then I'd found that outside of music, I didn't share in Bardic's majority interests. Drink, drugs, girls," I clarify. "I don't drink much when I'm not trying to get in someone's breeches. I like being in right mind, and," I don't know why I hesitate to tell him, "Being around drunks makes me think of the bad times. I even worry if I'd know if I was taking it too far," I confess, needlessly gloomy. "They never seemed to care! None of them ever had to fear consequences. There's nothing wrong with being a drunk lord -"

"You get shouted down on Council a lot," he informs me. "And you might sober up and find your spouse has gone elsewhere. But you're right, it seems like some people get years-worth of rope before having to bother with hanging themselves."

"I've been such a stuck-up bore about it," I tell him. "Stefen, full of those nasty beggar stories about people rotting in gutters and whoring for drugs. Between that and my Gifts, I felt like I had a crowd of drunken vultures just waiting for each time I slipped up -"

"So you had to be perfect?" he surmises.

"No, just better than any of them." That tiny sigh again. I'm starting to find it affectionate. "And I often wasn't. I had _problems_ with composition classes." A little bitterness I should have set aside long before now. "They expect us to already _have_ the ability to compose, and then they insist on telling us _how_ to do it."

I feel his mood drop as if over an unexpected step, and there's a hanging moment where he realises there's no point miming brittle smiles in the dark, not with me. "That's why Breda couldn't admit me to Bardic. She thought well enough of my playing but I didn't have the Gift and I wasn't composing."

"It's horseshit, you know? There's _plenty_ get admitted with the other two Talents and then start writing their own songs later. They just _do_ it a bit differently. And I think that Dellar found them _less_ aggravating than me, for the most part." He doesn't want to test the wound by asking, but I can feel him wanting to know more. "I'd always made up songs on the streets. It was like having my own language - no one could talk back to me in it, because it was all _mine_ , and that was the only bit of power I had over anything. But it was all about letting off steam and turning out pockets - I couldn't fathom rating my work by any measure other than the coin it produced, and at first, I didn't even understand _why_ the Bards wanted me to write my songs down, never mind _how_. It just seemed to get in the way." I grinned. "I was barely literate, and next to impossible - I was composing more than boys years older than me, but formally speaking I was a nightmare. Dell told Breda I was _'of feral mind'_."

"And what made Dellar come to _that_ conclusion?"

"I kept asking him questions he didn't appreciate." 

"About...?"

"Money, mostly. I was told the topic was uncouth, and beneath me as an artist. Then even that dangling carrot got yanked away, when I found out Art certainly didn't mean I could sing about whatever _I_ wanted to sing about." And I can _feel_ his knowing smile. "Finding out I was shaych only made him worse - I once heard him chastising Breda about how she coddled me, because I was confused by my upbringing and needed a father figure. He was quite glad you were willing to be my mentor," I nudge him.

"Oh gods," he groans. "He has no idea, does he?"

"None," I reply brightly. "Not about the least thing."

"Gods," he murmurs again. "If I'd known you when I was young, I may have hated you. I would have certainly found you insufferable."

"You _do_ find me insufferable," I remind him.

"You would have intimidated me," he replies, more seriously than I deserve. "And given what a prig I was..." He turns away from me, and I hear his head thump hard on his pillow. "Nothing felt safe to me, then - not music, not the Palace, especially not being shaych."

"Did it ever?"

"Maybe when I don't think about it too hard." Which is never, and definitely isn't now. "But you, you just..."

I can sense that he understands it, if not well enough to vocalise or absorb my laws of survival. "I don't expect things to feel safe. I'm not sure -" I fall quiet, and he rolls back against me and jabs me with his elbow. "Well, no," I concede. "I guess I _do_ know what it feels like to be sure of something."

He doesn't need words to reply to that.


End file.
